Hello,
I have a Problem with some beauty Pics. Sometimes there are -Hairs- in the face even at woman. Please look at the picture.

How can I remove this hairs without destructing the -skin texture- and without -Blur- techniques.

Thanks

Well, I think it's hard to do without blur technique but...
I used healing brush tool, than painting with a soft brush and changing opacity in vary modes.
Regards,
Dan

G'day Daniel,
I am involved much in beauty retouching but I know of a couple of links that may be useful to you HERE (http://www.photoshoptechniques.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8822) and HERE (http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.asp?p=101733&seqNum=3&rl=1) as well as the tutoral space on this site... I hope this is of some help to you
-Littlecoo

Search for the term: Peach Fuzz in the Search function. There was a discussion on this some time ago. I tried Vikki's method on your image, but it didn't work too well. Too contrasty I think


K

I've tried many ways to deal with it and my only solution is using the paint brush and sampling the color next to it with a very small brush and painting it in. the only place I really have problems is when there is soo much hair it causes an off color shadow around it. I've had images take me hours of painful painting to get right.

If you're needing to get in so close, this issue would have been best dealt with at the photo shoot (get model to wax, change lighting), any chance of a re-shoot?

I ran a highpass layer over the image, just picking up the hairs and then inverted this. Set the blending mode to hard light. Using a mask just painted over the hairs to remove the brightness of them.

heres what i came up with -- i agree with gary...wax :grin:

Certainly not any better than others have posted ..... just another attempt.....

Beth

Cloning carefully at 26% opcity seems to help. :)

heres what i came up with -- i agree with gary...wax :grin:

Yours is grand, especially as you repaired her dried, chapped lip areas.

Maureen

Hello,
the dried, chapped lip areas are deliberately. That in the face are so much powder are deliberately too. But only the hairs disturb.

I dont need proposals what -RetouchBook- I should buy because I have 4 of them.

The problem with the hairs in the face is a special problem.

I want to remove the -hairs- without destroying the skin texture. It is no problem if the technique takes time. It should only work well.

If there is any idea tell me.

Thanks

danielbux123, sorry, didn't know that was your intention - i redid the image cloning mostly.

maureeno, thanks.

That looks great miguel!

Ok... don't really have the time to show you... but I've done this before.

I use D&B (Set of layers curves adjustments)

Hair by hair... with a very small brush (2 soft)

If I get the tima, I'll post sample

thanks ziaphra :)

What do you mean ?

Godmother is right, Dodge & Burn the individual hairs, I would stay away from blurs, and other "quick fixes", because with a blur, you removed the hairs, but now you have a bigger problem, a very obvious area that you retouched. People will notice that in a heart beat. You always want to try and maintain the original pixels, the goal is to try and blend the areas around the hairs into the skin tone. Dodge the dark areas, and burn the light areas.

place my before and after files on top of each other, and look at the Before & After.

this took about 5 min.

hope this helps.

I would experiement with patchtool on a new layer...with around 40%opacity! go in deep around 200-300% and start using patch tool...remeber to use a clean hairless area with around the same skin color...then go around and do small adjustments so the are blends inn with lip area...I copy the area I want to patch up along with a clean area so I can work on a new layer...therefor the bace picture isn't hurt by my many mistakes...It takes abit notice and training to get teh patch tool to get right...

It's a nice way to work on big areas ion the face that's is very hard to fix...


Gerry

Your problem is there isnt any skin texture there to preserve - this is beyond peach fuzz - the length and brightness of the hairs are obscuring all the underlying skin - To make a decent picture out of this - reshooting is the only option.
The only way you're going to remove that tash is by replacing it with texture taken from elsewhere (or making it up) - the skin texture under the nose is however is different to other parts of the face so you would probably have to sample texture from another photo - at which point you might as well reshoot since it wont be any more authentic.
All the skin texture in the sample you showed is bad, poor skin, large pores and lots of hair - you could save yourself a lot of time by getting better models.

Nancy J is correct. How about waxing for the model, then reshoot? Somebody once said on this forum "if the image isn't good enough to print, then it isn't good enough to retouch".

NancyJ & Shelby are right, reshoot would be the best bet.

-But, here's where all retouchers skills come in to play, forget the reshoot, this is an image supplied by the client, and a reshoot is out of the question, we're already overbudget on the job, and production is already in the 11th hour.

-What can you do to fix this shot?

-This is what i deal with everyday!!!

ok then I suggest sourcing texture from another image. Find one similar and the same file size.

Or really carefull healing and cloning.

Did this in three steps. Duped the layer and blasted the hairs away with the healing brush. Then masked that layer and painted out the hairs with a small brush at low opacity. Finally, used the healing brush again to bring texture back to any soft spots.

http://edgework.tripod.com/samples/hairs.jpg

Hi,

Got a method which is pretty quick with good results. In the example below I assumed that all of the grunge other than the hairs was to remain. So I concentrated on removing the hairs only. The other grunge could be removed by this and other methods if desired.

Dup layer, linear light blending, run high pass. I used a radius of 7.0. the idea is to get as much contrast between the hair and other. Any lower, less contrast. Any higher, shadows and highlights get funky. It's an by eye, trial and error thing.

Invert dup and add a hide all mask. Paint hairs with a high opacity, soft, small, white brush. Vary tone by pressure or building up strokes. You don't want a even tone for the whole hair. Use zig zag strokes working back and forth between the dark and light parts of the hair. Process darkens light areas and lightens dark areas with same white brush. You want to break up hair lines by creating randomness. Work at 100% with 4 pix brush. You need not be as precise as you do if you were burning and dodging. Dodging and burning leaves halos - burn the light area and the dark area next to it is affected. Been there, lots of work.

Took maybe 5 minutes for the result below. If anyone has another example with peach fuzz, I'd like to try this method on it. This is the first image I used the process on and I'd like to see how it works on a variety of images. Maybe it's a one trick pony?

I made a PDF tutorial, 500k. If you would like send me an email and I'll send you a copy. leuallenatcomcast.net

Larry

leuallens method looks IMHO absolutely best ..
My way would be cloning with quite hard brush , and expanding hair - less area to clone from later on ...

...can be your friend. Did some other things too (but not as good as I should have). :)

Tried the technique I mentioned in the previous post on a more conventional image with peach fuzz. The results were good. Took less than ten min.

Larry

I want to thank Larry for the tutorial it has done in 20 min. what took me about 3+ hours. The results are amazing. I have to learn more about masking.

Hi Daniel:

I thnk Cassidy is on the right track. Excluding the lips, I used the high pass filter to isolate the hairs - then increased the contrast and copied it into an alpha channel. Slight blurring and the turned it into a selection with which to operate only on the hairs. Changed those hair colors and brightness to match the flesh tone produced the result below. Hairs are gone, the remainder is far easier to deal with.

One more . . . .

Beth

Bravo, Beth ... better than mine.

What was your work flow?

Stosh

Hi Stosh.....

Thanks for your kind comments........ it was such an easy thing and a cheating thing too because I stole the idea from Ikroll......

Download the Xero Filter Pluggin (free just Google it) once those are in your filter section, this is what I did....

I opened the file then went Image > duplicate > OK
(now you have 2 - Image A and Image B - you can do this other ways I'm just telling you how mine came about)

To Image A:
Ctrl + J to duplicate layer and on this layer I went Filters > Xero > Fuzzifier
played around with various strengths, found one I liked for pores and clicked OK.

To Image B:
Ctrl + J to duplicate layer and did the same as with Image A except I concentrated on making hairs softer..... click OK.

I held the Shift key down as I dragged Image A over Image B (so they'll line up perfectly) once A was on B I played with the opacity of the layers until I landed on one I liked......

Before flattening, I used the eraser to clean up lips and nostril.......

Again, thanks Ikroll for the idea !!!

Beth

Thanks Solitear - I'll give it a try. Can't argue with the results.

A suggestion - to line up the layers more easily (using photoshop), try converting either layer to Difference mode. Activate the move tool and do a rough alignment. Use the arrow keys to move the image pixel by pixel. When the pixels of each layer match exactly, the image will be all black as they are subracted from each other. Then convert back to normal mode and the layers are perfectly aligned. It's fool proof.

Stosh

Thanks stosh........ hey, I've got a question for you smartie pants :) ........ unless I've missed something (which is happening quite often these days) how is the Difference method easier than holding the shift key when dragging the whole layer onto a matching layer?

Don't be trying to mess me up by using one of those weird blending modes that nobody ever really uses........ you know the ones ........ Difference..... Hard Mix ........ those modes were just put there to make it look like Photoshop was hard....... that's why they're down at the bottom and not at the top of the list.....

oxox
Beth

Thanks stosh........ hey, I've got a question for you smartie pants :) ........ unless I've missed something (which is happening quite often these days) how is the Difference method easier than holding the shift key when dragging the whole layer onto a matching layer?

Don't be trying to mess me up by using one of those weird blending modes that nobody ever really uses........ you know the ones ........ Difference..... Hard Mix ........ those modes were just put there to make it look like Photoshop was hard....... that's why they're down at the bottom and not at the top of the list.....

oxox
Beth


Well Beth, my pants may have just gotten a bit less smart.

So far as I know, holding the shift key while using the Move tool restricts the movement to either horizontal or vertical ... nothing between. If your mis-alignment is other than a straight horizontal or vertical line, it won't help to align the images. If there is another use, I'd like to know more about it ... always willing to learn.

The only use I have found for Difference mode (a fancy blend mode at the bottom of the list (:Þ) is exactly what i suggested above ... to align two identical layers or portions of layers of identical images. For example, if faced with merging the overlap of difficult of mis-matched panorama images, you can align them manually by temporarily changing one to Difference blending mode and using the move tool as above. This blend actually subtracts the pixel values of the blended image from the base image. What happens is that when the pixels exactly overlay each other, the net RGB result is 0,0,0 and the pixel goes black. To perform an accurate, exact match, you can move the selected image one pixel at a time using the arrow keys, until you get exact coincidence - a totally black overlap area. It really works a treat ... try it.

BTW, this is not an original idea ... I read it in a book; one of many I often turn to for help. I'll be pleased to share, if you would like the reference.

Stosh

P.S. Here's another amazing shortcut for those esoteric blend modes. Take any image and make a duplicate layer. Select the top layer and activate the Move tool. Now hold the Shift key and click the "+" key ... the blend mode changes to the next one down on the list. By continuing to click the "+" key while holding Shift, the blend modes cycle and you can see what effect each blend mode has on the base image. Select the one you like most and vary the Opacity to lessen the effect to taste. The "-" key moves you up the list to retrace your steps. Now THAT is a smart set of trousers - eh? Same book!

OK stosh ......... you have completely redeemed yourself and, after reading your last paragraph, I've actually placed you higher than mere smartie pants level....... Wow....... what a great trick!!! Thanks!

I really have had the need to line things up perfectly and your "low down on the list Difference" blend mode would be a much better way than my "scientific, high-brow, drag over and hope my astigmatism isn't too bad while I squint and keep adjusting opacity" method......

I do thank you for the tricks and for the smiles, too.....

oxoxox
Beth

Hey, talk about the "Beauty Shoot Problem". Do not talk about "Who is better than..." This can you discuss in the -Sigmund Freud Pro- forum.

Thanks

I just tried a theory and I'm not too disappointed with how it turned out. I basically blurred the whole image, then added some noise until it looked decent. Then I used the history brush to get the hard lines back on the non hairy parts. Finally I used the history lightly to get some of the texture back in the upper lip, and then only had to do some very small touchups with dodge and burn. then I ran some dodge over the lighted areas to try to even out the light source because I think the hair cast a shadow where there shouldn't be one.

Anyway, I played for a few minutes and it looks okay.